Ian Watt Lecture: Judith Butler, “Lukacs On Kafka and Mann” (1/28/2025)

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00;00;12;04 - 00;00;38;09 Welcome, and thanks for joining us for another installment of CSN cafe, the podcast for the center for the study of the novel. In this episode, our host, Hector Ayers is joined by Judith Butler, who is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Katie Livingston and Lydia Burleson, who are both PhD candidates in the Department of English at Stanford. 00;00;38;11 - 00;00;59;25 Judith visited the center on January 28th to deliver their eon lecture on Lucretius ambivalent relation to Kafka's work. This conversation was recorded directly before that lecture, and we are delighted to be sharing it with you now. Thank you for listening in on another one of our warm and informal conversations. 00;00;59;28 - 00;01;31;09 Welcome, everyone. This fine afternoon I am joined by Katie Livingston, who is a fourth year English PhD who studies women economics and queer futurity in the late 19th and early 20th century American novel by Lydia Burleson, who is a third year PhD candidate in English whose research considers competing eugenic and proletarian visions in 20th century American literature, and by none other than Judith Butler, who is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. 00;01;31;12 - 00;01;45;13 Their most recent book is entitled Who's Afraid of Gender? From 2024 and today, January 28th, 2025. Twist Butler will be delivering the Ian Watts Lecture under the title Historicity of Forum Lucretius. 00;01;45;13 - 00;01;46;00 irritation, 00;01;46;00 - 00;01;55;25 with Kafka. My mind went to translation for some reason. Well, that would have been interesting. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. It is so good to have you. 00;01;55;27 - 00;02;22;27 We'd like to, kick things off in this very loose conversation, by, talking about the state of nature, which, in, in your previous, book and in different moments in your writing, you have been engaging with as a fiction. And since we are here at the center for the study of the novel, and we like to think of, the novel form capacious Lee this, realization of, 00;02;22;27 - 00;02;25;25 the state of nature as fiction is really important to us. 00;02;25;28 - 00;02;29;15 So I was wondering if you could maybe tell us, what role, 00;02;29;15 - 00;02;31;22 does that play in your in your current thinking? 00;02;31;22 - 00;02;32;16 Unknown Well, 00;02;32;16 - 00;02;33;29 Unknown It's a difficult, 00;02;33;29 - 00;02;51;16 Unknown question for me because, you could be asking, what for? Judith Butler is the state of nature, or you could be asking, how does the state of nature become invoked in contemporary discourses against gender? 00;02;51;18 - 00;03;19;29 Unknown So in the first instance, I'm elaborating my own position, and the second I'm tracking a discursive phenomenon. And in this book, who's afraid of gender? I'm only tracking a discursive phenomenon. I mean, it is true that there is a section of this book on biology that talks about the interaction of biological and cultural, social, economic forces and makes an argument against biological reductionism. 00;03;20;02 - 00;03;25;09 Unknown But I don't think the state of nature plays a role there. Natural law. 00;03;25;09 - 00;03;29;01 Unknown It was in Christian doctrine does play, 00;03;29;01 - 00;03;34;04 Unknown a role in some, conservative Christian, 00;03;34;04 - 00;03;55;08 Unknown oppositions to the idea of gender because they think of gender as fully constructed culturally or as human made. And it goes in the, applies in the face of their understanding that, sex is given by God, and that natural law, reflects God's will. 00;03;55;11 - 00;04;05;06 Unknown And natural law stipulates that there are two and only two sexes. So, you know, those are the various ways in which I'm dealing with it in this book. 00;04;05;06 - 00;04;17;20 Unknown I have always been interested in the state of nature, particularly, in Rousseau, which and I've taught Rousseau a great deal at UC Berkeley. 00;04;17;20 - 00;04;43;28 Unknown And I was taken by, Steckel Pesci's, reading of Rousseau's State of Nature as a, nostalgic or retrospective fiction, that is elaborated, from whatever point of view happens to be contemporary in that theorization or elaboration of liberal political philosophy. 00;04;44;00 - 00;05;14;00 Unknown And that it holds a kind of place within that theory. So it's neither a foundation philosophically nor in historical time and place, considered historically. It is a, a fiction or an imaginary positing of a certain kind that allows for a counterpoint to contemporary reality. So in much the same way as we say, utopian fiction transports us out of the time and place coordinates that we take for granted. 00;05;14;03 - 00;05;36;11 Unknown And gives us, a point of view or a perspective on the organization of time and space within the president or indeed in the past. One could say that the state of nature for journalists. Barsky, for instance, is, an imagined perspective from which we can take, 00;05;36;11 - 00;05;41;27 Unknown productively estranged relation to contemporary political life. 00;05;41;29 - 00;06;12;02 Unknown Yeah. I and you've, you know, very, adequately to my mind, diagnose it as a, as a phantasm. There's this there's something there of, you don't use this terminology of, of a symptomatic reading in that you, you see the question underlying, the answer, and it seems to me that this, invocation of states of nature, just gets more and more, efficacious in, in political life. 00;06;12;02 - 00;06;41;22 Unknown Thank you. That's a really important, question because it helps me to distinguish between a kind of necessary fiction or a perspective dystopian utopian that allows us to think about contemporary life and understand the contingency of its organization, helps us to imagine different kinds of organization or kinship with the state, or whatever you might have with class itself. 00;06;41;25 - 00;07;23;14 Unknown But the idea of the phantasm is, I think, a little bit different. A phantasm is, for me, a psychosocial construct. So when we say gender has become a phantasm or, and migrants have become phantasms or transpeople have become phantasms within contemporary political life, we're saying that they attract anxiety, they mobilize fear and hatred. They condense a set of false meanings, and are used, circulated to produce certain kinds of political effects, like voting for authoritarians or, voting for those who propose mass deportation ourselves. 00;07;23;14 - 00;07;49;20 Unknown Viable. What political option? So a phantasm is psychosocial, and I think it does involve some, diagnostic readings. I mean, I think we do need, to use the resources of psychoanalysis, but we also need to understand how fear and hatred are socially organized, in ways that psychoanalysis this doesn't always acknowledge. Before I pass on the mic, as it were. 00;07;49;22 - 00;08;14;19 Unknown Judith, could you tell us more about the functionality aspect of this? I mean, the things that come to mind can be, rhetorical instruments, metaphor, possible pay, you know, to speak on behalf of someone else. Seemingly, it could also be unity of action. There's a certain temporality associated with these, you know, pro-Syrian, fictions. 00;08;14;19 - 00;08;16;02 Unknown Right. And phantasms. 00;08;16;02 - 00;08;16;21 Unknown so what, 00;08;16;21 - 00;08;35;14 Unknown should we as, as scholars of the novel, right, be doing to engage more with these, embodied need? And at the same time, spectral, phantasms. So thank you. That gives me, another way in. So, 00;08;35;14 - 00;08;46;27 Unknown In my, reflection on how the opposition to so-called gender ideology works, in different countries. 00;08;46;27 - 00;08;48;07 Unknown And here we're talking, 00;08;48;07 - 00;08;52;26 Unknown unfortunately, contemporary Argentina, we're also talking Chile and, 00;08;52;26 - 00;09;24;20 Unknown Colombia, not so long ago in presidential elections, Mexico City, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the U.S, Hungary, Russia, Taiwan and and Korea, South Korea, which just protested by a bunch of Christian nationalists. So this it it works differently. Their different strategies in different parts of the world, different strategies, especially in Central Africa, where the, 00;09;24;20 - 00;09;26;28 Unknown apostolic churches, 00;09;26;28 - 00;09;33;29 Unknown maintain control over social services, as government funding and government functions have fallen apart. 00;09;34;01 - 00;09;55;25 Unknown So, whatever they might have to say about gender in education or in health care becomes normative by virtue of fact that they'll want supplying all the education, health care, employment, etc.. So in some of them at least, there is what I would call, 00;09;55;25 - 00;10;03;00 Unknown a restoration fantasy, that is to say, a wish to restore a prior order to the world. 00;10;03;02 - 00;10;08;03 Unknown That would make everyone's lives more secure. 00;10;08;03 - 00;10;36;28 Unknown And a sense that issues like gender or racial justice or migrant rights, that these issues all are imported from elsewhere. Sometimes they're even characterized as colonial imports, if by the right wing, have taken over the language. And what's called for is a restoration of order where men are men and women are women, and there's no no other options. 00;10;37;00 - 00;10;47;04 Unknown Sex is binary by nature, by law. Up. And this is not a variable saying, no legal recourse to any variation. 00;10;47;04 - 00;10;53;20 Unknown No epistemological resource tenure variation. So the time to which, 00;10;53;20 - 00;10;55;02 Unknown some of these 00;10;55;02 - 00;11;13;28 Unknown movements wish to return is not actually a time that never existed. And if it did exist, it did so by repressing or excluding all those who have come forward to say we've not been treated equally, we've not recognized our existence, we've been denied basic freedoms. 00;11;14;01 - 00;11;17;08 Unknown So if it did exist, it existed 00;11;17;08 - 00;11;58;19 Unknown through repression and exclusion or abjection and effacement. And so in an unjust fashion. And yet it seems to those who wish to return, to this impossible time, this, this lost time, that never was, that somehow order would be restored. So the reason why somebody who convinced of that might be applauding a fascist leader or applauding potentially or actually genocidal actions or, deportations and the like, stripping people of basic rights. 00;11;58;19 - 00;12;33;28 Unknown The reason is that they think they're doing a good thing. They're restoring society to its proper form. They're they're defending the social good against these invaders or these demons or these foreigners, all of whom are messing it up. Okay. Now, for me, social and political life is messy and ought to be, and we keep learning who has and has not been included and whose rights have been acknowledged and not, and what the structural inequalities are and how we might think about overcoming them. 00;12;34;00 - 00;12;59;22 Unknown And so there's a process of learning and learning about mistakes we have made. And, seeking not to recommit those errors. But, in the case of a low restoration fantasy, I would suggest there's a furious nostalgia to restore at time that never was. So how that works in the novel form is totally interesting. Right. 00;12;59;22 - 00;13;20;18 Unknown Because it's a forward movement insofar. It's like, let's get these elected leaders, let's join this movement. Let's call for the following kinds of things. This is the world I want to see, but the world I want to see is behind me. And posited as behind me. But it's also posited as an impossible, there's an impossible time and space. 00;13;20;20 - 00;13;54;23 Unknown So this returns us again, to the question of a, I suppose, a fictional arrangement of time and space that serves, highly reactionary politics. And how might we then distinguish between that one and a utopian rearrangement of time and space that serves, a vision that calls for the greater realization of freedom, justice, equality? It is hard to throw a wrench into the self-fulfilling, potential of these ideals. 00;13;54;25 - 00;14;21;23 Unknown You know, even in Hobbes. Right? Man is wolf to man. I mean, if it's if you concede the premise and you arrive to all of the conclusions there, but but maybe it's time to segue into into a different portion of our conversation. Yeah. Could I actually stay there for a little longer? On this idea of the restoration of fantasy and what you were saying, Judith, one thing that immediately came to mind is the slogan Make America Great Again. 00;14;21;26 - 00;14;51;26 Unknown And you can think about the work that, again, is doing there. Yes. To suggest that there was another time, even without specifying the time. That's right. In which it is referring to and it's interesting and I would agree with the inclination to call it a utopia, which is where my work thinking about competing utopic visions, both in the early 20th century and the contemporary moment, intersects with this idea. 00;14;51;28 - 00;15;19;19 Unknown And one thing that I the reason I wanted to stay on it a little bit longer is thinking about how the mobilization of fear and hatred within that Make America Great Again moniker, that slogan, is related to feelings that the world is ending because of the entrance of these things, and the previous world order that we had established did not actually exist, is allowing in. 00;15;19;21 - 00;15;46;29 Unknown And what you were saying about that also relating to promoting a certain kind of fantastical ideal citizen, and that whoever does not fit that model is not allowed to be a full person in this, in this world. And so the question there, as it relates to the form, and this idea of restoring fantasy in utopia is what is a realism? 00;15;47;05 - 00;16;18;24 Unknown How can realism describe this? So in the literature that we read for today, he describes realism as developing a new typology for each new phase of evolution and society. It displays the contradictions within the society and the individual in the context of a dialectical unity. And I'm also thinking in conversation with some of the work being done in this department and speculative realism, and thinking about what exactly are the limits of realism. 00;16;18;24 - 00;16;44;16 Unknown As a former, how do we think about this relationship between how Lukaku is describing what realism can do and what you are also talking about this restoration of a fantasy that could have a dialectical paradoxical opposed other side to it. Yeah, well thank you. Those are actually two big questions conjoined. Some of which I'll answer later. If, if, if that's okay. 00;16;44;16 - 00;17;14;13 Unknown But, let me see what I can do. All right. So let's let's think about it this way. Start with the proposition that a lot of people are living with fear. They don't know what's going to happen to the world. They don't know if there's a future or what the future might be like. And I think some helpful context is that Katie and I are both from the South, and I am specifically from like a poor rural, conservative, largely conservative community. 00;17;14;13 - 00;17;35;24 Unknown Yes. So how do you hold the humanity of someone who is also operating within an ideology that excludes a certain group of people? Yes. And how do you understand the fear of where that is coming? Yes, I, I completely agree with you. And I think it is important to hold that humanity, when we start not holding each other's humanity, we're lost. 00;17;35;24 - 00;17;44;18 Unknown We can't argue from there. We can't wish from there we kind match well from there. So I totally take your point. But 00;17;44;18 - 00;18;00;23 Unknown conservative white people in the South, for people of color in the North, wherever, whatever we're talking about, a lot of people, for different reasons, feel a lot of fear. Labor is not organized in the way that it used to be. 00;18;00;23 - 00;18;35;20 Unknown It's much more periodic and, provisional and transitory. Pensions are no longer available in the same way they used to be. Something's happening with the climate. It seems catastrophic, changing agricultural life and economy. A lot of people having to move from places where it's no longer livable. My my mother's locked inside in Phoenix almost every day at the age of 95. 00;18;35;22 - 00;18;44;06 Unknown People worried about wars, why they're waged, how they might come to an end if they really can, destruction 00;18;44;06 - 00;18;59;01 Unknown of the earth, of of people, of animals, of a way of imagining the future. I think there's a lot of general disorientation throughout the political spectrum. Okay. And then the question is, how do we think about that? 00;18;59;03 - 00;19;20;00 Unknown What are the what are the true causes? If we might talk that way, what are the sources? What has brought us to this point? How do we tell a story? How do we reconstruct how and why so many people now live with fear, some of whom have converted fear to hatred, some of who whom live fear as paralysis? 00;19;20;03 - 00;19;32;02 Unknown Or dystopian vision, some of whom live with fear and have revolutionary zeal, or understand themselves as combatants in one kind of war or another. 00;19;32;13 - 00;20;05;10 Unknown Are there historical and structural reasons for what's happened with labor? What's happened? What's with the Earth's? What's happened with wars? How do we think about the history of racism? How do we think about the history of, repression and exclusion when it comes to gender queer people or trans people or gay and lesbian people? How do we think about the reactions to gain lesbian marriage and adoption? 00;20;05;12 - 00;20;32;12 Unknown Many issues like this. What would be the account that would make sense of them? And what would be the bid or the petition on the part of those who wish to secure a progressive agenda, or even the left agenda for those issues? Well, the big the petition has to be, that we actually want a world in which everybody is free to breathe and move without fear. 00;20;32;18 - 00;21;03;22 Unknown We actually want a world in which everybody feels they have equal dignity. So whether you're a white, Christian, conservative or, a radical person in an urban university disconnected from those communities, or shuttling between them, in the way that some do, we're all of we all have equal dignity as persons. Right? So that vision, it seems to me, has not taken hold right now. 00;21;03;25 - 00;21;23;22 Unknown Right? When I'm having a a passionate embrace of equality or not having a passionate embrace of equal freedom, we're not having a passionate embrace of justice that would allow us to take a critical position, say, on the organization of prisons or borders or wars. 00;21;23;22 - 00;21;35;12 Unknown So what story to tell? What history do we give? How do we delimit that history in order to explain why we're living in fear and how we might live in hope? 00;21;35;14 - 00;21;37;20 Unknown Right. Seems to me the 00;21;37;20 - 00;22;06;04 Unknown Democratic Party missed its chances little bit, but nothing less than a larger historical account. Why people are living with the anxiety are especially workers with completely uncertain futures, or not knowing whether they're going to stop working or pay that that unpayable debt. Right. Which is the corrosive character of that anxiety. Many of us with salaries have never experienced the corrosive character of that anxiety. 00;22;06;04 - 00;22;19;17 Unknown And it's also an anxiety about children or dependents or grandparent aunts. Somebody is paying for that place my mother's locked into to me. But, 00;22;19;17 - 00;22;38;12 Unknown but what if no one was and it was me and I wasn't me? It would be a different situation altogether. So I think, one might say, that when one says, oh, it's these migrants, it's these trans people. 00;22;38;14 - 00;23;08;25 Unknown It's these books that are being taught in elementary school. That's what's ruining society, is they're not a deflection from another set of possible causes. So that we don't look there, we don't question capitalism, we don't question the prison system, war, environmental pollution, industrial pollution. We don't we don't question the normalization of war or nationalism. We we we accept all of that as part of the way the world should be. 00;23;08;27 - 00;23;36;21 Unknown And we identify as the problem with this world, these highly vulnerable communities who are easy, more easy to dispense with than the structural changes that would be required to change the world in a way that might realize some of our deeper hopes for equality, justice, and freedom. I feel, this conversation will be listened to for for years to come. 00;23;36;21 - 00;24;02;17 Unknown And so I, I hesitate to mention something of the conjuncture. And at the same time, I think there was an important diplomatic president that's relevant here. But it had never happened that Twitter Diplo matic, kerfuffle between the sitting president of the United States, who shall go unnamed, at least by me. And, who stole petrol? The president of Colombia, unbelievable. 00;24;02;20 - 00;24;29;21 Unknown Did not take in, military flights, who were taking migrants and also convicted criminals. Purposefully, jumbled together and reportedly in handcuffs. The president of a sovereign nation, rejected this this planes and instead, as, as of now, what's going to end up happening is that Colombia is going to send airplanes to pick up these migrants. 00;24;29;21 - 00;25;00;23 Unknown And the reason why, President Petro rejected these military flights was, because migrants should be assured expelled, if that is, you know, the the decision of a sovereign nation vis a vis the citizens of another sovereign nation, but with dignity. And so that that argument of equal dignity, I think, is just springing up in many different places, and, many people have a hard time, really, letting that sink in that, you know, equal dignity as persons. 00;25;00;23 - 00;25;24;07 Unknown It's, hard to say the last thing I'll say about the conjuncture, because, again, I think it is germane is, as a result, over Twitter, the sitting president of the United States just issued tariffs on a country, that, whole prices didn't last more than 24 hours. But for a while, the tariffs were in place and they could have just crippled an economy over this Twitter feud. 00;25;24;10 - 00;25;50;22 Unknown So this is a world where we're recording this and hopefully it will seem in hindsight and like a, like a distant and and and on specific memory. And and it you know, it's not the, the sign of things to come. It is my sincere hope. We, we are reading for for those who are, listening us, Lucas with, Judith Butler. 00;25;50;25 - 00;26;21;04 Unknown Lucas is, interesting critique of Franz Kafka. And, maybe it would be a good moment to talk about this, because it is not, disconnected from, present day concerns. And. Yes. No, I was thinking exactly this, that much of our conversation thus far has actually been a great segue into the reading that you've provided for us ahead of the talk. 00;26;21;06 - 00;26;48;01 Unknown For the listeners at home. This is from Lucas's book, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. And it's the chapter Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann. This is from some of his later writing, 1955. Yeah. So we were wondering why specifically Lucas, but also specifically this Lucas and is there anything in particular that you would like to draw attention to? 00;26;48;04 - 00;27;32;11 Unknown In this chapter? Yeah. Well, in fact, most of my remarks today, in the talk, are about Lucas theory, the novel which was written in 1914 and published in 1916. So by 1955, he's still in the Communist Party, and he's something of an official minister of culture in Hungary. So he's both writing his own work, but he's also, communicating, dogmatic position from within a party line or trying to define the party line because he's in a position power to do so. 00;27;32;13 - 00;27;58;13 Unknown He worries that, modernists like Kafka and Wolf, simply report or record subjective impressions that are disconnected from a broader world. And they don't let us think about that connection. Right. So we were earlier asking, how are people living in fear? How are people living anxiety or even desire during this time? And I suggested for that. 00;27;58;16 - 00;28;33;15 Unknown To answer that question, we would have to maybe use the resources of psychoanalysis and social theory alike. And I guess I would suggest to you that, Lucas worries that, individualism and in particular subjectivism within literary modernism, keeps the reader trapped in a subjective perspective without ever relating it to the broader social totality. 00;28;33;17 - 00;29;07;23 Unknown The social totality is present, but it's there, as something that cannot be changed, as something that's a given, like, an on an immutable landscape of a certain kind. Now it's one thing to say, okay, we live with global capitalism and its radical inequalities, as we see from the way in which, the US president can threaten like, and a nation like Columbia, 00;29;07;25 - 00;29;37;10 Unknown We could shrug our shoulders and, just say that is the way life is. Or, of course, that's how society is structured. And has been for a long time. Don't be unrealistic. Don't be, don't don't have high hopes of changing that. I mean, come on, we need a real politic, a politics that, you know, stays within the real and has a chance of becoming strategically effective. 00;29;37;13 - 00;30;05;13 Unknown But even those kinds of claims of realism, they're conciliatory or acquiescent claims. And look at proposes them. He doesn't want that kind of realism. He's been accused sometimes of being too conciliatory to the Communist Party. And I can name at least ten things he did with which I vehemently disagree, including failing to condemn the Moscow trials in the late 30s, until much later. 00;30;05;18 - 00;30;47;05 Unknown And then the only thing you said about them was like, they weren't strategically wise. Like, no, they were radically unjust. What's wrong with you? But, but here, the what I want to say is that for him, realism is about developing a form that can allow us to see in the minutest details and the most subjective feelings, a broader historical world at work, not determining what we feel of not determining all the details of perceptual details that we record by structuring them, informing them in such a way that we take them in a certain way, and also through narration of a certain kind. 00;30;47;05 - 00;31;25;03 Unknown And here he's a big fan of the longer historical novels. That quickly fell out of popularity after the turn of the century, although now come back as entertainment novels in our contemporary life. He wanted those those long novels by Thomas Mann, the the Magic Mountains, they, but do they do? Well, they give you a rich set of contexts that give you a sense of a world coming apart, the world of the firm, the firm attached to the family, people starting to scatter people. 00;31;25;05 - 00;31;46;19 Unknown People with money starting to lose. Starting to go into debt to keep social appearances in place. So there's fragmentation. But the novel gives a sense of the whole and allows you to grasp it as a whole, so you're not fragmented to. So we don't just come to accept fragmentation as the way of things. It's like air fragmentation. 00;31;46;23 - 00;31;47;17 Unknown That's it's 00;31;47;17 - 00;32;11;06 Unknown the form is very for him, it's very it does some work. It actually gives you the occasion for reflection. You see how they're working together in a way that you don't see when you're just living it outside the novel. So for him, the novel, it's important. And, and, you know, in 55 he's going to talk about contradictions and dialectics. 00;32;11;09 - 00;32;18;10 Unknown But what if we said, something like, 00;32;18;18 - 00;32;43;18 Unknown Migrants are being deported because they are a threat to the good society. So to deport them is to do a good thing. However, deporting migrants is a very bad thing, and it really damages them, and it damages society as well, because those of us who are left, left are left with a government that deports people on the basis of their documentation, their ethnicity, their background. 00;32;43;20 - 00;33;03;14 Unknown So we're committing an injustice. Now, both of those claims can be true at the same time, in the sense that there are people who hold them both so descriptively true. Like, okay, there are those who think that's a good thing. And others say that what you call good is actually bad. That's a that's a contradiction, right? That's a contradiction. 00;33;03;14 - 00;33;26;16 Unknown It's a contemporary contradiction. How would we get out of that contradiction? What would be the in Lucas's term, the dialectical overcoming of that impasse or contradiction? One person says, oh, it's migrants, it's gender ideology, it's race or critical race theory or ethnic studies. These are all the things you need to shut down. DTI shut them down, and life would be good to get. 00;33;26;19 - 00;33;58;15 Unknown And others to say to shut them down is to, return us to a time of radical inequality, repression, censorship and the like. Surveillance. And that's. That couldn't be worse. It's a terrible thing. So do we just live with that discrepancy point of view, or is there perspective some of us could take that might understand why people hold these discrepant views and actually try to foster a more embracing view that would overcome that antagonism. 00;33;58;17 - 00;34;29;01 Unknown That's the question that Luca just posing about the realist, the historical realism in particular. Right. So the idea, is at least partially that realism is able to give a sense of history and perhaps hold more of these counter views as opposed to modernism. Earlier in the conversation, which I disagree, by the way, I'm just I'm trying that's what I'm trying to give a sympathetic rendition, because that's how I was learned. 00;34;29;03 - 00;34;52;25 Unknown It's how I learn to teach. But people get confused because sometimes might. Renditions are so sympathetic. I think. Yes. Well, he does introduce a little bit of, complication to this in, the piece. Yes. We do know is each the makes this claim that these are kind of warring forms within works themselves not necessarily right becomes more interesting. 00;34;52;27 - 00;35;19;29 Unknown Yeah. But I was wondering, just, going off what you were saying and some things that were, were said earlier about, say the form of the novel having a kind of like teleology towards an end, a forward momentum, thinking about being able to imagine a future, modernism as kind of reflecting this fragmentary, consciousness or a disorganization. 00;35;20;01 - 00;35;30;15 Unknown I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit more to how this piece is interacting with, say, futurity or being able to imagine a future? 00;35;31;04 - 00;35;33;01 Unknown It's a really good question. 00;35;33;01 - 00;35;52;18 Unknown You might have to read further in Luke Cage, but, you know, he didn't think that history unfolds dialectically in a necessary way, like it was. Just imagine of it was just a question of waiting for the dialectic to unfold. There are people who feel that way. They're more historical materialists, though, and it's not his view. 00;35;52;21 - 00;36;19;10 Unknown But he does think that there are occasions where the dissonance within a novel allows you to see a totality, a social, a the social world as a totality, and that it also allows you to, see different social worlds as totality as you read the history of the historical novel. Right? Because there are different histories that are being brought together. 00;36;19;10 - 00;36;55;22 Unknown Societies can be organized differently. So I think there are potentials that open up from these antagonisms. He wants to keep the antagonism alive. Well, what's what he, in his earlier work, calls it dissonance. Between, say, subjective and objective fields or between and description, description of detail and description of broader structural forces. I think that, at once. 00;36;55;22 - 00;37;10;23 Unknown When does that the hope that he had and it's one that now seems, implausible from our perspective. Is is that being able to grasp that totality would 00;37;10;23 - 00;37;37;10 Unknown call into question the necessity of that particular social organization or expose its contradictions and lead us outside the text to think differently? For instance, when he wrote theory of the novel, and I'll talk about this briefly, he reflects back on it, I think in 1962, he's in his 80s. 00;37;37;13 - 00;38;03;22 Unknown So, he reflects back on something that he wrote, 70 years earlier. So I can't I can't claim to have written anything 70 years ago, but one day, maybe I will not. Not that soon, but soon. But, he said, oh, I was really upset about young people being enthusiastic about war, and I wanted them to curb their enthusiasm. 00;38;03;22 - 00;38;33;08 Unknown And I just thought, well, who's going to read theory the novel for that? But he believed that if you had a if you could expose a dialectical unity of the kind he was describing, that you would be able to reflect on society rather than just recapitulate its terms. And it's that reflection on society that he imagined people doing by sitting around and thinking about novels in different ways. 00;38;33;11 - 00;38;55;07 Unknown He had a belief that, esthetic forms and the reflection upon makes us more historically aware and self-conscious and less willing or less liable to, simply recapitulate them as they are. So he was, in his early years, at least, a utopian. And there are bits of it, 00;38;55;07 - 00;39;07;07 Unknown in the historical novel, for sure. There I think, though, the the question is where is dynamism in his account? 00;39;07;07 - 00;39;23;22 Unknown Is this a static account of society or is there dynamism? And if there's dynamism that's linked to certain kinds of conflicts, contradictions or antagonisms, then that helps us see what the struggle is for a different kind of world. 00;39;23;22 - 00;39;34;12 Unknown I might interject a couple of, connections here. When, Judith, you were discussing the let's be realistic moment in politics. 00;39;34;12 - 00;40;08;07 Unknown Let's not ask. I couldn't help but think about, the graffiti, made 1968 surrealist demand perceived. So be realistic. Demand what's impossible? With impossible. Yeah. Which which, you know, captures, a dialectic. And, I think, you know, this issue of, of realism is, is bound to our representational apparatuses and, at political subject code. 00;40;08;10 - 00;40;33;06 Unknown Let me pull a different, connection here, a different example, namely Imax as the a medium of our day. I would love to hear Lucas, you know, talking about the detail in dynamics and how, you know, detailed it is, but how those details do not add up to any totality. But on the contrary, you know, I guess distract, I find myself agreeing with location on some accounts. 00;40;33;06 - 00;41;01;07 Unknown I have to say, clearly not with others. And, I wanted to read a quote from the Lucas, for, for, our listeners. I think that that might be helpful. The modernist writer identifies what is necessarily a subjective experience with reality as such, thus giving a distorted picture of reality as a whole. Parenthesis. Virginia Woolf is an extreme example of this. 00;41;01;09 - 00;41;25;16 Unknown The realist, with his critical detachment, places what is a significant, specifically modern experience in a wider context, giving it only the emphasis it deserves as part of a greater objective whole. So just just why to to throw that out there. And, and, and, you know, writing of, a source in a for the title of your book, Who's Afraid of of gender? 00;41;25;16 - 00;41;33;27 Unknown Perhaps we could ask here. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Right? Yes. Yet again, look at. 00;41;33;29 - 00;42;13;13 Unknown So, yeah, I just I just wanted to to draw those those connections and maybe, pass it over. That video. Yeah. Something that I'm thinking from what we've been talking about right now, what you said, Judith, like about the realist novel keeping this antagonism alive within it. And about that, the relation of that antagonism to the trajectory or the totality of the novel, both thinking about the engine that actually drives the story forward, and then the things in the novel that make it feel whole. 00;42;13;13 - 00;42;42;08 Unknown So how does a novel have a beginning and an end? And one thing that I am thinking about in conversation with that I'm also currently teaching narrative theory. So maybe that's why I keep going to these formalist readings. And we just I just taught the students easy and, I think that also feels somewhat relevant to this conversation. 00;42;42;08 - 00;43;12;14 Unknown Yeah. This distinction between the readerly and the writerly. And it sounds like what you're saying, is that the within if we were to put those two categories in conversation with Luke, like this feeling of totality or this feeling of the novel being able to give some sense to the world, as Lucas says, that it potentially could. When you take its typology and then the author's perspective into account. 00;43;12;16 - 00;43;48;20 Unknown As having a limiting factor or thinking about, I guess, to potentially redeem modernism, which for those who know me, know that I never take that stance. But to think about, yeah, just like the possibility of meaning or what does it mean? And this goes back to what you were saying a bit, or about the fact that, what would it mean to imagine and otherwise within a form that within a novel that has a long history of realism, is that still how we define the novel functioning today? 00;43;48;22 - 00;44;05;05 Unknown And then we see people resisting that art? What does it mean to imagine and otherwise on the other side of the reality, if our understanding of reality is being shaped by this realist typology, there's a question in there. Yeah, there are many good points in there. Thank you. 00;44;05;05 - 00;44;06;05 Unknown Well, 00;44;06;05 - 00;44;37;26 Unknown I mean, obviously one strong response to Lucas's claim that Virginia Woolf remains, restricted to distorted subjective impressions and abandons the world as such, is that the world as such, has become a distorted place where many distortions are being manufactured all the time, and where, a sense of reality has, become distorted. 00;44;37;28 - 00;45;05;24 Unknown I'm just thinking our sense of the whether our sense of the future or our sense of of, the earth, our sense of labor, there are a lot of things that have been disrupted or are no longer, clearly known in the way that, at least for some people, who who enjoyed a sense of stability in this world. 00;45;05;26 - 00;45;25;04 Unknown Was never, never the case before. I mean, Dennis Ferreira da Silva says, oh, all of you people who are worried about the end of the world, talk to us Brazilian black artist, philosopher, the doctor from the favelas, as she says, to talk to us. We've been living past the end of the world for a very long time. 00;45;25;04 - 00;46;05;11 Unknown You know, it's actually kind of interesting the things you can imagine from here. So, you know, we also have to ask who's experiencing the anxiety and terror about what and what stability. Did they enjoy it? What condition did they enjoy that like who is not enjoying it when you were enjoying it? So there all those kinds of questions, but if the world has become distorted or fragmented, then a realist novel has to capture distortion and fragmentation in some way, and to do so is not to remain restricted to a subjective impression, but actually to honor the imperatives of realism. 00;46;05;14 - 00;46;26;25 Unknown This is reality. Here it is. You may not like it, and it may not correspond to an older idea of reality that you thought was reality. But here it is. So that reading of realism is a much more capacious definition that would allow for the distortion to be part of what the real experience of reality is. That's correct. 00;46;26;25 - 00;47;04;18 Unknown To destabilize an objective understanding of reality. Well, no. If you follow the philosopher Sandra Harding, we would be redefining objectivity as well, because, the fact is that the objective world, if we want to speak in that way, is characterized by certain inequalities or certain injustices or certain ways of arranging society that are fragmenting or inconsistent or contradictory. 00;47;04;21 - 00;47;46;04 Unknown So if you have a novel form that recapitulates that fragmentation or that internal division or that sense of unease uncertainty, you are actually staying close to historical reality in its objective form. Historic. The objectivity of history changes over time and the conditions of history change. And they also change depending from what perspective one is looking. Right, which is why we can have histories from below, or we can have histories that are monumental or anti monumental, that focus on heroes or focus on the people. 00;47;46;07 - 00;47;49;01 Unknown Or you know, there's, 00;47;49;01 - 00;47;49;29 Unknown so, 00;47;49;29 - 00;47;50;21 Unknown I think, 00;47;50;21 - 00;48;14;02 Unknown that Luke Kutcher's distinction begs the question of how the historical world comes to inform our subjective realities, but also how our ways of engaging in the world and reflecting upon it change the course of history or, or have a capacity to transform some of those structures that we are registering. 00;48;14;04 - 00;48;35;29 Unknown So ideally in Marxist world, both of those things would be accounted for. But he has an intellectual list, approach. We might say although he was up, he was still, in the Communist Party in 1955, and wasn't booted out until, about a year and a half later. 00;48;35;29 - 00;49;01;26 Unknown One thing I appreciate about our conversation is how theory, criticism and action are all connected. And, a very sad effect of modern university life is academic silos, and it's very easy to be among the theorists who only want to talk about theory, among the critics who only want to talk about racism, or among the activists, who only want to do something. 00;49;01;26 - 00;49;25;19 Unknown And here, what you see is the necessity of these instances and their articulation, and that is that is quite, precious. Our, our time is, is slowly but surely coming to an end. And I wanted to bring up something, a document, a historical document I, I found in the archives, which is the The New York Times review for the Lucas, book. 00;49;25;22 - 00;50;02;12 Unknown That with Butler has been, examining, there are some interesting quotes and I don't bring this, in an asymptomatic way. I realize that this is an artifact. The reviewer by the name, Melvin Lasky, writing for, The New York Times in May 1964, allows himself to write something to this effect, this kind of semi orthodox Marxism for all this continental learning and sweep is to mechanical and to involved in political sloganeering to be read with profit or with pleasure. 00;50;02;14 - 00;50;27;13 Unknown But here's something that happened. I think science have indeed a life of their own. Or maybe the copy editor gave us this gift. It's actually a written mechanical. It's not written mechanical. It's so so this I see the maniacal as a as a word that's embedded in there. It it writes starts with the, ends with I also there might have been a little condensation. 00;50;27;16 - 00;50;52;19 Unknown It's maniacal and mechanical. Yes. Yeah. Mean somebody should choose this. So I said to you, I just found this, you know, very, very endearing. But behind this there's, it's also part of an anti Marxists of the time. Right. So if that was the year is maybe 64 okay. So yeah, we're, we're not far from accursed McCarthyism meant a lot of anti-communist. 00;50;52;22 - 00;51;15;24 Unknown Sloganeering and the New York Times as well. I mean, look, there is a wooden character to some of his analysis and he's more rigid here than he is. In, in the earlier work, which is one reason I'm going to look at the early work, today. But, I think that he is, 00;51;15;24 - 00;51;17;02 Unknown he's alarmed, 00;51;17;02 - 00;51;19;12 Unknown by a certain kind of subject. 00;51;19;18 - 00;52;08;05 Unknown What? He understands the subjectivism. And he also, is warding off the, the possibility, that writers like Kafka, especially, who are obviously indigenous words refracting and historical reality within their texts, sometimes without even naming a time and place. That that is, that's the future of realism. Because it is actually absorbing something from the environment, from the way, bureaucracies are run, from the way legal violence is, is operating from the history of colonialism. 00;52;08;05 - 00;52;36;10 Unknown And some of the short stories, you know, is, is this is this the future of the novel? And if so, it's not the kind of novel that, feels whole and is not under an internal imperative to come to a conclusion that is a true ending or that gives us a clear way to say this is beginning, middle and end. 00;52;36;13 - 00;52;56;14 Unknown It doesn't it doesn't unfold in that way. And hence, it's very much part of a 20th century break with the historical novel as a model of realism and just a certain dystopia to strip description as the new realism, oddly enough. 00;52;56;14 - 00;53;01;17 Unknown so there is, there is that, I must say about Siloing, 00;53;01;17 - 00;53;02;28 Unknown I went back and thought, why? 00;53;02;28 - 00;53;29;28 Unknown Why did I say I would write on Luke Hutch? Well, it's because I'm actually writing on Kafka. I have, and I've been doing that for a long time, and I hope one day that I have a book, and I've always wondered about why Luke Cage was so, you know, ill tempered about Kafka. It's just nonsense. I mean, he and many people think of Kafka as left or Marxist or, you know, I mean, he can be anything for anyone, unfortunately. 00;53;30;01 - 00;53;52;26 Unknown But why would look at you take that point of view on him, and he's he bothers him even more than Wolf. He thinks he can dismiss Wolf, which he cannot. But, but I went back and I thought, oh, I, I took graduate courses on realism with Paul Dumont, of all things. I my first course I ever taught at Wesley in university. 00;53;52;26 - 00;54;23;17 Unknown My first job was on realism and representation. And I, I worked on this problem, German esthetics and my tutorial in German in college was on German esthetics and reading with Katrin Adorno. And then I went on a Fulbright to Heidelberg, where I was reading Hermeneutics and Learning German Idealism. But I was all over this material. Visited Frankfurt several times and started learning more about location. 00;54;23;17 - 00;55;02;02 Unknown I don't know at that point. Anyway, I loved it, and I am because I wrote a dissertation on Hegel, an errant Hegelian fallen, highly Hegelian. But it was fun to go back and I realized it's part of me. It's part of my it's part of the intensity of my early training in philosophy and in literature. And so I'm in favor of that intensity, that intense research going deep into that material, doing it in the original language, kind of finding stuff that's not translated, that is a really important part of my life, especially in working on Kafka. 00;55;02;04 - 00;55;20;29 Unknown And it's slow and it's hard and it takes years. So we do need to have that information, and I'm really glad I have it. At the same time, there have to be parts of the university that are dedicated to these more open discussions and maybe parts of classrooms that are dedicated to these more open discussions, like, why are we reading? 00;55;20;29 - 00;55;49;07 Unknown How does it speak to us now? What's its relationship to respond? How do we how do we think about this in terms of our own problems of racism? All of those open important questions? There has to be that. And that's where our interdisciplinary conversations happen, hopefully in well-funded institutes or centers or in or, you know, in cafes after class or wherever it might be. 00;55;49;09 - 00;56;14;18 Unknown But that's also part of university life. They both are. Right. So for me, there's a, productive antenna, me or an antagonism between that scholarly work and my more public work. And I think most people don't know I do this. Yeah. We do appreciate our colleagues in the German studies department who might be listening and spent, lots of time with, with this kind of text. 00;56;14;18 - 00;56;36;20 Unknown I especially appreciate your if you're, bringing this text back, I want to say, from the dead. Yeah, it is from the dead. And also because there is how an a world organized on an East-West axis. Yeah, that comes back to us at a time when we don't quite understand those dynamics, and yet we are the product of them. 00;56;36;22 - 00;56;58;08 Unknown It bears remembering that Lucas here was the unorthodox, orthodox Marxist. He was not the Orthodox mark. He was. It was difficult to pin him down. He was reprimanded. Right. Well, and he was radically inconsistent, too. Right. All right. We talked about, ends, before, but it seems that an open end is the best way to go. 00;56;58;14 - 00;57;04;00 Unknown I actually you do. Please. Okay, one more thing that I would like to pick up ahead for. Possible. 00;57;04;00 - 00;57;22;18 Unknown this is a bit of a pivot, though. Not unrelated. You know, I it's difficult for me to read anything that kind of completely dismisses a singular literary form as ideologically, necessar narrowly representing a single ideology right through its form. 00;57;22;21 - 00;57;46;14 Unknown So going back to Wolf. I one thing that I was thinking, as I was reading this is a lot of times the, the form of her writing is actually posited as something quite, revolutionary in a way, because of how it deals with temporalities and maybe thinking about, queer temporalities as well. I'm thinking particularly of Mrs. Dalloway. 00;57;46;14 - 00;58;27;12 Unknown So this kind of dislocation in time, right, is maybe representative of, a life that's not abiding by, certain prescriptions toward, futurity. So that would include heterosexual marriage, reproductive futurity through the child, what have you. These are pretty, and these are staple arguments in queer theory, right? That this kind of, like, forward momentum, has either like a normative or even, like, phallic implication and that, queer literatures that disrupt this are kind of like disrupting this hegemony. 00;58;27;18 - 00;58;53;19 Unknown Right? So I was thinking about that in relation to this idea that, modernism is necessarily, bourgeois ideology that, kind of like limiting all other, social contacts. These are very competing ideas, right, of at one on the one hand, maybe it's revolutionary. On the other hand, it's bourgeois. So I was wondering if you had any any thoughts on that. 00;58;53;21 - 00;58;57;04 Unknown Yeah. Well, I think it's important to, 00;58;57;04 - 00;58;57;21 Unknown resist 00;58;57;21 - 00;59;23;09 Unknown the dialectical framing of history in the way that, Luke Hutch puts it here because it's actually a devolution airy, position that sees modernism as, regressive tendency. Or perhaps it's contemporary, but it, it should, go back to the better time of Thomas Mann. 00;59;23;12 - 00;59;50;19 Unknown But the problem with Thomas Mann, of course, is that he's giving histories of push, wildlife and bourgeois suffering. And he's a self-avowed, apolitical man. Right. He wrote of a very famous set of, one essay in particular called, remarks of an Unpolitical man. But Luke Cage has a, a strange affinity with the bourgeois, and he'd rather hang with them sometimes than with the Communist Party. 00;59;50;19 - 01;00;14;19 Unknown And he got in trouble for saying that out loud. But they're holding the cultural heritage that he likes. And what he's really frightened of is that that cultural heritage is going to be destroyed, and that what we'll be left with or solve this fragmented literature, that will simply, make it impossible to reconstruct the world. Dialectically. 01;00;14;21 - 01;00;28;15 Unknown But, you know, Jameson was in arguably Lucretius best reader, his deepest reader. And I took some of his courses, actually, and college to he was, I guess, about ten years older than I was. 01;00;28;15 - 01;00;40;00 Unknown 16, 18 years old to me. But, But he liked lots of blue culture. But one of the things he said was, the truth is not the whole. 01;00;40;03 - 01;01;20;13 Unknown That's not where we find truth through a notion of totality. We actually have to deal with the partial, the fragmented, that that is what illuminates something about history and especially, catastrophic history. Lucas was unable to think about catastrophe or dispersion or, people on the move, forcible displacement or stories that don't have a single trajectory in the same time and place that are moving among times and places where they're migrants or that are exiled. 01;01;20;13 - 01;01;48;14 Unknown so there are a lot of limits to that. I think one has to be against developmental notions of history and evolutionary notions of history. The developmental ones are normative for all the reasons that queer temporality critique have taught us. And Beth Friedman is, I think, a particularly good on this. But also evolutionary, because that comes closer to what we're hearing about. 01;01;48;16 - 01;02;16;26 Unknown Oh, we should be restoring prior orders. And Mongo is interesting to Luke Cage because he was nostalgic at the same time. He was trying to grasp the present and, and describe it. But there's a, there's a nostalgia very possibly what I've been calling a furious nostalgia can look such that you see in that text that I gave you, not because I love its framework, but because the irritation with Kafka is so telling. 01;02;16;28 - 01;03;03;27 Unknown And, Lydia, could I ask you to, give some closure to this conversation to have a last word? Sure. Yeah. One thing that I, would just want to end on is kind of something that you already were circling back to Judith, and your answer to Katie's question about the relationship between the form of the text, the perspective or ideology of the writer of the text, and then these broader social political structures, through which the text were written and then through also which we are receiving texts and how we see in this. 01;03;04;00 - 01;03;34;20 Unknown Like you pointed out in your comment, we see this again, nostalgia for a prior order, a prior mode of being without specifying what that mode of being is. Yeah. And so, yeah, I guess maybe to go back to something in my first question to give this conversation a closed, because you are a 19th century person and maybe at my heart, okay, that's fine. 01;03;34;20 - 01;03;57;01 Unknown We get to live wherever we to. Yeah. Yeah. Just what should we how should we interpret a form that looks backward without specifying its backwardness? At the same time that we are imagining a form that looks forward without specifying its forward. Well. 01;03;57;09 - 01;03;58;26 Unknown Maybe think of it this way. 01;03;58;26 - 01;04;20;11 Unknown But maybe this is also the question like where's the, where's the, what potentials are opened by like at just reading or what potentials are opened in that historical novel that we call realist? Is it just a description of what is if we just keep going back to what is this is the case, this is the description of the world. 01;04;20;11 - 01;04;48;00 Unknown These are conditions. End of discussion. Or is it the case that the perspective for which the description is given, the perspective that's built by the narrative structure itself or possibly by the voice, the narrative voice, the perspective that's built allows us to both see it, but be at a distance from it and hold out for a potential reorganization. 01;04;48;03 - 01;05;19;15 Unknown Either A through an Arcadian or a utopian. Fictive, some maneuver of some kind. In other words, can we posit possibility outside of the present reality, and can we do it through a particular kind of literary form? And then there's some deeper question is the possibility that's being posited through perspective or estrangement or, say, positing a future, positing a past? 01;05;19;17 - 01;05;49;13 Unknown Is that a narrative contribution exclusively to the description? Or are these potentials that are actually being discerned in historical reality that are brought out by, a narrative that seeks recourse to a future or a past perspective to describe the present? Does it does it help us see something that's in the world that we might actually understand us? 01;05;49;13 - 01;06;10;02 Unknown Its potential? Because if potentials are in the world, then a realistic account of the world would have to include those potentially. And thank you very much to each and every one of you. We have been conversing with Judith Butler, Lydia Burleson, and Katie Livingston. Methodologies, faculty director of the center for the study of the novel Group. 01;06;10;02 - 01;06;11;16 Unknown Thank thank you. 01;06;11;18 - 01;06;13;14 Unknown Thank you so much.